Limousin Calves Grow Fast

The view from my back porch about 7:00 am. ZZ Tom on the right.

Most mornings I get this view of my cattle herd from my back porch.  They come up from the creek at the bottom of this hill to a salt feeder.  From here somehow they decide where they will spend the day.  Sometimes they go east to pasture, sometimes south.

The last week or so the weather has been hot and humid and the flies are very bad.  Many of the cows and calves, and the bulls too for that matter, crowd into the barn where they stand side by side head to tail and tail to head so they can swish the flies off each other. 

I have a large handheld garden sprayer full of fly spray and I try to sneak in the barn and give them all a good soaking but they hate the smell and don't understand what I'm trying to do for them, so they leave in a huff. The picture below is of Bobby with his ears back slogging out of the barn to escape me and the sprayer.

Bobby the bull, also known as HSF InFocus. He's purebred Angus

Bob is having a great summer breeding the cows.  We decided not to AI this year - the calving is just too strung out from March to whenever. Here it is the end of June and we still have two cows to calve.  So, Bob gets the run of the herd until the last calf is at least three months old.  He has to share the pasture with ZZ Tom, my nice yearling Limi bull out of Violet by Tommy Boy. I notice that Tom is checking out the ladies and Bob lets him sniff around a bit, but then knocks Tom out of the way if things begin to get busy.  I have Tom for sale and hopefully soon he will have a herd of his own. He's very calm and sweet tempered and looks so much like his brother Thor that I know he will make someone a great herd bull.


Calves by BTAP Thor

Speaking of BTAP Thor, he was purchased earlier this spring by a farm near Akron, Ohio. Most of this year's calf crop are by Thor and we are very pleased with the results. In the picture at right the calf on the far left is by Thor out of Sarah, a big white Shorthorn cow. The bull in the center is by Thor out of a registered Angus cow.  The calf on the right is purebred Angus.  They were all born in mid March.  The Limis come small (we only pulled one calf and that was Violets stillborn bull) and grow very fast. The Angus may catch up with them around two years of age but generally the Limousin influenced cattle are bigger than the Angus - that's why they are known as the carcass breed - lots of pounds of meat.